finding document class file

[Alois Steindl]

Hello,
after your vague description of your setup it is hard to give any 
advice. It helps usually to consult the documentation, of course.
It seems, that you use some kind of Linux. How did you install TeXLive? 
Some distributions provide their own setup.
The usual setup for TeXLive is quite sophisticated and user-friendly: As 
soon, as some binary from TeXLive is executed, it looks into a 
reasonable list of places for its files. Only experienced users should 
therefore distribute the files arbritarily in their file system.
If for some good reason some input files lie somewhere else, one can use 
the environment variable TEXINPUTS to point there. Or you could move 
these into the local texmf tree, or use links to access them.
If that sounds too complicated, ask a local expert.
So maybe a short recipe:
Install a standard setup (either from your distribution or from the 
TeXLive repository).
Copy local class files to the appropriate places in the local texmf tree 
(usually texmf-local below the global texlive tree, there the style 
files should reside in the local tree tex/latex/...)
Make sure, your system finds your binaries (usually below 
texlive/<year>/bin/<system>)
Reread the introductory pages.
Good luck
Alois

Am 30.01.2022 um 16:54 schrieb Urs Liska:
> Hi, this is my first post, actually the trigger to subscribing (again).
>
> I'm not sure if this is a valid question for this list, but I hope for
> some negligence if it isn't.
>
> After some fiddling I managed to get TeXLive to find .sty files in a
> local directory below ~/git/latex, making it think this is the local
> texmf tree root.
>
> After this "hello world" test I'll work on getting an earlier - pretty
> complex - project set-up to work again on a new computer after my laptop
> has been stolen. The compilation stops, not finding the document class
> file :-( However, the class file is not in something as a texmf tree
> (which I use to place manually installed or in-repository packages
> into), but in the working tree of my project repository. So I would
> either have to use the class through a relative path or declare a given
> directory as a root that should be searched recursively to find files.
>
> Any suggestions would be helpful. And again, sorry if the question is
> inappropriate.
>
> Best and thank you
> Urs